Dave Lowe recently did a series of “Sinister Saint” cartoons on Para Abnormal, highlighting saints who are the patrons of things like gravediggers and swordsmiths. He decided to turn a couple of them into novena candles for Halloween props, and posted a how-to on his blog.

He’s got the “candle-ready” images he used available for download, but the same method could be used for the image of your choice. Adding stained-glass effects to a picture is fairly easy in Photoshop (this is one method, but there are lots of other tutorials available for the googling), and if you have access to a color printer it’d be easy to turn out lots of these pretty quickly.

These might make interesting favors for parties or weddings: Browse through the Big List o’Saints* to find appropriate patrons,*** fancy up their icons in Photoshop (bonus: Old-time saints tended to get sainted by dint of being gruesomely martyred, so the artwork depicting them frequently looks like something Clive Barker dreamed up), print, glue, and done!

I’m a big fan of projects that look like they took much more time and skill than they actually did, and this is something that even the most thumb-fingered amongst us should be able to accomplish pretty easily.

*Not its real title.**

**Although, frankly, given that there’s patron saint of knife-grinders and a saint you’re supposed to pray to for in-law problems, it’s hard to think of it by anything grander.

***Incidentally, the patron saint of the Internet is St. Isidore. Despite having lived around 600 AD, when broadband really wasn’t widely available, he was nominated as the patron of computers, computer techs, and the Internet in 1999.